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Here's How an Actor Just Ended the Case for Reparations

Here's How an Actor Just Ended the Case for Reparations
AP Photo/Eric Risberg

This writer watches a lot of movies, and she'd never heard of actor Roy Wood Jr. until the other day when this video came across her X feed. He's been on The Daily Show, Hulu's Only Murders In The Building, and Better Call Saul.

It's not exactly a stellar career. But Wood recently went on a podcast to talk about his 2012 experience on Finding Your Roots, a show that revealed his ancestor came from Africa in 1790, and that he apparently found the descendants of the family who purchased his ancestor as a slave.

What followed was a creepy and revealing exchange.

"If I wanted to today, I could find the White Wood descendants in southern Georgia and pull up on their f***ing house one day," Wood said.

That behavior in and of itself raises red flags. Wood's ancestor came over from Africa in 1790, 235 years ago. For the sake of argument, if we define a generation as happening every 25 years, that's 9.4 generations. The descendants of the family that purchased Wood's ancestors are two and a half centuries removed from their ancestors.

Yet for Wood and others, that doesn't seem to absolve them of the sins of the father. It should. There is no world in which people born in a different century should be held accountable for the things their ancestors did (or didn't) do. Does Wood even have definitive proof that these are the people related to the slave owners? Probably not.

Which brings me to my second point. 

Wood continued his remarks, saying, "They ain't got no money, though. I Zillow'd their crib. They broke. That's the thing we were talking about with slavery, man. It was a lot of white people fumbled...How you broke and you had slaves?"

Ah. There it is. Did Wood hope to find wealthy people? If so, would he have tried to get reparations from them? Leftists across America have pushed the idea of reparations for years, because they subscribe to the same mentality that people like me have to pay for things that happened decades ago. I was born in 1983, not 1683. I never owned slaves. Neither did the family Wood stalked.

This is just one instance of a broader problem with the Left, and it's one we can't overlook. Just two months ago, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon warned Buncombe County, North Carolina that its reparations plan was unconstitutional

Here's what some of those plan proposals included:

The report also said the recommendations intended to “repair generations of harm experienced by Black residents across five key areas: criminal justice, education, housing, economic development, and health & wellness.”

The Commission’s recommendations included “establishing a Black wealth-building fund, creating community land trusts, expanding access to culturally responsive healthcare, reimagining school curricula to reflect Black history, and transforming public safety systems. The recommendations also call for ongoing accountability through a permanent reparations oversight body.”

The economic development recommendations specifically call for establishing “business corridors with commercial space for Black-owned businesses and community services in close proximity to Black neighborhoods,” and creating a private fund that could “provide direct cash payments to individuals harmed by racial discrimination.”

Among the proposed educational reforms are an effort to recruit Black teachers and encourage Black students to enroll in Advanced Placement and other academically challenging programs, as well as “teaching inclusive, historically accurate, diverse education within schools.”

It also allegedly provided free transportation for Black pregnant women and housing assistance for Black residents.

Things like reparations plans and land acknowledgments are annoying, but they're also dangerous. They could establish a legal precedent that would one day allow a court to return that land to its "rightful" owner or rule that a White person owes reparations to someone. What's to stop someone else from doing what Wood did, but taking it even further and demanding that this family forfeit their house for alleged past grievances? Nothing.

And Ron Wood, Jr. was never a slave. In fact, he's the privileged one in this situation by his own admission. He found it very funny that this family wasn't rich and that they didn't somehow turn slave ownership into a line of generational wealth. I thought slavery was a bad thing, so shouldn't he be relieved they didn't?

Guess not.

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